


Under an Apple Tree

by Willowingends



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Beaujester if you squint, Blood, Death is temporary, Discussion of the Afterlife, Gen, I've only listed major players in this fic but they're all there, Implied Violence, Resurrection, resurrection fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-21
Updated: 2019-07-21
Packaged: 2020-07-10 01:53:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,827
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19897948
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Willowingends/pseuds/Willowingends
Summary: The glaive is sharp, bright, and cuts the air like butter.Beauregard is faced with the face of an old friend and an easy choice to make.





	Under an Apple Tree

She sees it coming. But she can't step aside and avoid it, refuses to parry, to push it aside and allow the risk of those behind her taking the brunt of the damage. 

She faces the oncoming attack with a battle ready stance even as her muscles scream at her to move, to dodge. That they're too tired to take anymore. 

The glaive is sharp, bright, and cuts the air like butter. 

And just like that she feels pain. No sharper, no stronger than anything else she's taken this fight. But it's enough, she can feel the wet blood welling, warm in contrast to the freezing air around them. When she bares her teeth they're stained red with the blood from her lungs. 

"You're fucking dead." She snarls in to the face of their enemy before the world spins, before heavy blackness settles across her shoulders like a cloak, like wings. Heavy feathers that tug and pull and drag a soul free. 

Screams follow Beauregard down to the ground, sounds of rage, of pain, of denial. But she's not there to hear them.

  
  


* * *

She's standing in front of a very familiar tree. She's come here year after year, ever since they had settled enough to allow trips for pleasure rather than work. She's not sure any trip to this marker can be called a pleasure. But it is the most fitting place for her to be. 

The apple tree stretches above her, and a figure that's half blurry memory, half incorrect reality lounges beneath it, half eaten apple tossed about in his hands. "About time you showed up. The Moonweaver was really put out that she had to loan me to the Queen."

"Molly." 

The name passes through her lips like a whisper of wind, and then she is racing through the grass and clinging to her best friend as though her life depends upon it. He is ethereal. He feels cold and light and horribly, horribly there. Beauregard draws back just as quickly as she had gathered the startled tiefling in to her arms and punches him square in the face. 

"You're a gods damned idiot!" 

Her shouted words break the peace of his gravesite as he stands there, rubbing his jaw. She tugs at the collar of his shirt, bringing him close again with anger burning in her eyes. "You just went and, and did  _ that _ !" She snarls, and the playful light of mockery in his eyes has her radiating with suppressed anger. 

"You know," he drawls, casual and careless, "I'm pretty sure I've heard this speech once or twice before. We are allowed to hear things addressed to us y'know."

She had forgotten what an asshole he was. In all the mourning, in all the drive to be a better person, a better friend, she had forgotten that grief and loss and time cloud images of those long gone. 

"Why am I here?" She spits at him, glancing down at his chest now. Whole, unmarked, unmarred. 

Mollymauk's fingers lightly comes to rest on her stomach and she feels a sharp sting, a sharp tug, and watches as phantom red blossoms like poppies across her dark skin. "Because you have a choice to make. And while I'm not the Raven's, I am the closest thing to death you cared for."

Past and present tense mixed together like that make her soul ache. Or maybe that's the throbbing in her gut, getting stronger, getting tighter. 

(" _ -that's why I'm asking you to listen. Your my first mate. I can't sail this unruly world without you. We ain't done yet, so get up, and get back to your destiny." _ )

"What're my options. I want to know everything."

He grins as he lounges back against his tree. The apple is back in his hand, whole where it had been half eaten. Unreal and unnatural and it had her sneering. Wasn't all this supposed to be the most natural thing in life? He waves a finger in her direction and she fights the urge to break it. 

Gods she had missed him. 

"I don't know all your options Beauregard. I've never known anything and I still don't now. Death isn't some all freeing, all knowing concept. I haven't learned a damn thing since I went to be with the Moonweaver." He smiles casually as he speaks so peacefully about confusion. About false promises and the unknown. The same way he always had.

"That's bull." 

Her words are still biting, but she settles down beside him. The grass below her is just as comfortable as it always is when she visits this place on the material plane. Roots poke up from the ground, bruising her ass, and the branches above aren't quite thick enough to block out the brightest rays of the twilight nothing around them. 

( _ Heaviness on her chest. If she was breathing she would be struggling now. Purring, loud and comforting and loving.  _ " _ Ah, I am not a healer. I have never been. But let me save someone, Beauregard, please.") _

Beauregard realizes she can't see the stars here. 

Her head finds his shoulder as they sit under his tree. The apple in his hand spins and spins and she blinks and it becomes a coin. "The way I see it, you have two options." He flashes the gold between his fingers and she watches as the symbol changes. Heads tails heads tails heads tails. "You can rest. You've been fighting a damn longer time then I had been. You died protecting someone. A lot of someones. You can take a load off, smoke something good with me again, and then make your happy way to whatever Ioun's got. She'd probably claim a clever, feisty girl like you."

Beau's lip curled up. "That doesn't comfort me." 

"It shouldn't." 

She found comfort in his sharp smile. She had always found comfort there, even when they had fought. For the short time they had known each other. Had it only been such a short time? He had had such an impact on her life, even all these years later she found herself trying so hard to leave every place better than she had found it. 

"You do decent at doing that."

"Are you reading my mind now?"

"No, I just happen to know you." 

A beat of silence ss she stared at him in disbelief and then -

"I hate being dead."

Beauregard grins as she shocks a laugh out of him. He leans back on the grass, catching the coin midair and flicks it as it becomes a card. One of his cards. The ones she still carried. Had carried. 

( _ "Beauregard.") _

"Yeah, I feel that. But it's just some other first I got that this body hadn't had before me. Permanent. I like having something permanent." 

"We would have been permanent."

His red eyes move to her and he gently reaches out and pats her hand.

( _ "Beauregard!") _

"I know that. But I wasn't." He smiles again, and this time it is with a sorrowfulness that makes her heart wrench. Beat. Pound. "The dead aren't good friends Beau. They haunt you, wrap around your ankles-"

(" _ Please! Please you can't leave you can't! I won't let you, please don't leave me!") _

"We drag you down until you can't see clearly through the muck-"

(" _ You're my best friend! My first friend!") _

"You can't see what's right in front of you with ghosts in the way."

He flips the card around and she snatches it from the air as it flies at her face. It seems to flicker before her eyes. Switching, changing. Judgement, The Fool, Death, The Wheel. Swift, only a momentary glance at each as she holds the card between her two fingers. "I've never figured out what these mean."

"What do you want to do?"

His voice is different now. Two-toned, heavy and still, dead and she doesn't look at him. Too afraid of who, what, she will see. Her eyes don't leave the card, faces now flickering before her like illusions, rippling in and out. Diaron, her mother, her father, her brother. Avantika, Oban, Lorenzo. 

Judgement, The Fool, Death. 

( _ "I want her back! Give her back to me! Ioun, Trickster, someone please!") _

Death.

The branches of the apple tree shake above her, like a gentle breeze, a million feathers. It's so cold under the starless sky.

* * *

Her robes are ice cold. That's the first thing she notices. The second is her chest is heavy. Filled with a strong rumbling purr. The third is her face is wet. Covered in-- her tongue flicks out, tasting the drops on her chapped lips, salty. 

Tears. 

Someone's been crying over her.

Beauregard's eyelids flutter open slowly, feeling like anvils had been attached to her eyelashes. Her body  _ aches _ . It hurts, she can feel bruised that crawl across her back, can feel old injuries in her arms, in her legs. But it's more than that. Her skin feels heavy, her eyes feel dull, she  _ hurts  _ and she's  _ tired _ why is she so tired?

Frumpkin is laying on her chest, her stomach feels crusted with something, there's tears on her cheeks and now, as she tries to concentrate on anything, she can see shimmering pieces of diamond floating in the air. 

All those facts are clues to what happened but she can't put them together. Pushing herself up into a half-sitting position, she attempts to get her bearings. Frumkpin slides into her lap and refused to move further. She's laying on the ground, there's blood pooled and drying below her, there's another body only a few feet away. It's covered in ice crystals and looks very, very dead. 

"Beau!" 

The cry startles her but her reactions are too slow. She can't catch the blue blur that enters her vision from the left and a gasp of pain escapes her as Jester flings herself, arms going around Beau's neck and squeezing tight. 

Her shoulder is wet as well now. Jester has been crying, hard. Still is from the quivering of her shoulders and the way she squeezes irregularly. Beau's arms tighten around the tiefling quickly. A protective move as much as an embrace. 

Ah, so that had happened. 

She had died. 

Beauregard lifts her gaze from the ground and looks at her friends, her family, gathered around her. Stoic determination tempered with relief, with happiness on the faces of few. Tears, of sorrow and happiness maybe, track down the faces of others. She holds on to Jester still but reaches out with her other hand to them. To her family. 

And their hands reach out to her so well. Clasping, holding her tight. Everyone of them. 

"You think something like that could keep me down?" She grins, feeling Jester hiccup a laugh against her shoulder. She feels, better. Tired, yes, but not weary. As though a heavy albatross had been cut free from around her throat. Her blue eyes flash, "So what the hell happened? I wanna know everything."


End file.
